[This was developed from a paper presented at the Lambat-Liwanag Confer­ence on Synergism in Total Human Development held at the Asian Social Institute, Manila, on January 29, 2003, under the joint auspices of the Lambat-Liwanag Network of Empowering Paradigms, First Asia Institute of Technology and the Humanities (FAITH) in Tanauan City, Batangas, and ASI. ]

 

(to be) Jointly Published by the

SanibLakas ng Taongbayan Foundation and the

International Academy of Management and Economics ( I / AME )

Manila, Philippines

2003

 

All Rights Reserved by the Author

Pilot Edition 2003

 

The Cover:

The cover shows the Human Holon, as a synergized whole of three parts or dimensions: Spirit (represented by the circular version of the logo of the SanibLakas LightShare Program, the Mind represented by the Holistic Health logo from the SanibLakas-published Seven Flames of Holistic Synergies, showing chakras, aura and mer-ka-ba, as designed by Ding Reyes and Vivien Virata; and the Body from the classic drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci. At the same time, the triune figure is framed by the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece, indicating that the Human is also a part of a grander synergetic whole. Cover design and execution by Ding Reyes.

 

The Author:

Ed Aurelio C. Reyes, also known as Ding: Professor in Applied Cosmic Anthropology, Asian Social Institute, Manila; Founding President, SanibLakas ng Taongbayan Foundation; Consultant (formerly founding Convenor), Lambat-Liwanag Network of Centers for Empowering Paradigms; Convenor, Katipunang DakiLahi Movement for National Synergy-Building; Convenor, Love Life Philippines Campaign and Services Network; and Founder, Kampanya para sa Kamalayan sa Kasaysayan (Kamalaysayan); among many other engagements.

 

Prayer

 

Our Divine Parent,

Holy be Your Name, Your kingdom come,

You will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

 

Give us today our bread for today,

And forgive us our offenses,

As we forgive those who hurt and offend us,

Do not bring us to the test

But deliver us from

     All alienation and separation from You

     And from one another.

 

Amen

CONTENTS  

   

 

Author’s Introduction:

Words, Words, Words!!!  

subject of synergism. The word synergism is no longer a “never-heard” word  to many English-speaking and English-reading intellectuals. But having heard of this word or having used it once or twice in conversation is still very far off from having a working comprehension of the very potent principle this word refers to. Oftentimes this word is dismissed as hi-fallutin’ gobbledygook good only for purely academic discourse one doesn’t usually have the luxury of time to engage in.

This is unfortunate because synergism refers to a very powerful tool that has always been available but has remained largely unused or, at best, underused in human endeavors.  Many times, the very people most need­ing and most expected to work in close and strong teamwork don’t seem to get their act together for periods lasting months, or lasting even years. But just a whiff of fragrance of this principle can make us seek to see more of the beautiful wholeness and con­sistency of the principle where ev­ery small nuance is a very important, nay indispensable, particle of the entire synergy of nuances, which is the principle itself.   

People can relate to the principle of synergism any which way they want to, preferably in an act of choosing among a wide range of options that are known to them, with a wide range of degrees of intellectual comprehension and arti­culation.  

The range in the degrees of comprehension is so wide. So is the personally chosen approach in sharing it.

At one end are persons who would not even have any use for the word synergism or for any word whatsoever, and yet really live it in their lives that they become it, and people around them can clearly appreciate it with only the term itself missing from the picture.  Many of these people are just smiling in silence, enjoying the universe “unfolding as it should.”  

Others choose to become part of that unfolding, in various ways, including wordless ways: live and be your message; unified consciousness of a critical mass (“square root of 1 percent”?) etc. etc.

Some who are discerning midwife roles for them to play in the hastening of that unfolding, and are ever zealous but ever patient, because any pace of change they may be actively involved in might necessitate periods of time longer than one would tend to expect or wish for.  In his Conversations With God trilogy, Neale Donald Walsch keeps close to the theme of doing everything we can in pursuit of a desire, as a “statement of who we are,” but without any emotional attachment to the result.  

At the other end are the people who choose to work in the arena of the academe and intellectualization and apply the stringent rigors to decisively convince the intel­lectual apologists of separative ego and human divisiveness that fragmentation and high walls do not define the essence of the human. The long-delayed writing of this book, is an attempt in the latter end.  It originally came forth in the form of a paper for presentation at the Conference on Synergism in Total Human Development conducted by the mainly-Academe-based Lambat-Liwanag (a Filipino term for “network of light”) Network of Centers of ab­out a dozen school-based centers of research and advocacy for paradigms shifts toward human empowerment, real development and harmony.  

My fellow presentors and the participants at that confer­ence and all other people who have time and interest to read the ideas and assertions presented here are asked to comprehend them as fully as possible without the pressure to agree with them. After the biting comes the chewing. Those who tend to agree are asked to accurately bring the points presented here into appropriate venues of dispassionate discourse (starting at inner debates within their own brains) and gather and send back to me all points that can directly and indirectly enrich these points or even correct them.  

In this context, I not only welcome criticisms on this, I even hunger for them, because all criticisms can be made useful, and some of them are even valid.  The synergy of all the nuggets of truth lodged in all the comments will surely emerge as a very powerful synthesis useful for many people who pursue empowerment for themselves and for “the least of (their) brethren.”  

Group of Consistently-Active Synergizers

There is this small but growing group of people committed to work together to mainstream the consciousness on and application of the principle of synergism in personal and community praxis in the Philippines. And along a two-fold mission to propagate the consciousness of synergism, bringing its message to the biggest number of people in the shortest possible time -- and to apply it everywhere, these committed propagators of the principles of synergism have realized that they have had to be the first and the most enthusiastic students about this principle, that they have had the responsibility to learn about its nuances well beyond the very general, even if correct, notions about the principle, if we are to apply it successfully and help others learn it accurately.  

This has been both difficult and exciting. I have reason to know of this, for I have been the main leader up to this time of this synergism-focused organization called SanibLakas ng Taongbayan (Filipino for “People’s Synergy”) Foundation in the Philippines. Having such two-fold mission as the Foundation does, we members cannot afford to slacken in our own inner edu­cation on this principle. Such education must cover theory, skills-development, and values formation.

Actually, more and more of our members and other people have started enjoying it all. Especially in recognizing the dy­namics of synergism in all kinds of human interactions, including their own empowerment.  Foundation co-founder Joydee C. Robledo said in 1998: “What kind of work does the SanibLakas Foundation do?  The kind that enables one to rediscover her/his inner will to achieve one’s maximum potential with the great­est sense of fulfillment. The kind that enables one to believe in herself/himself and convince others of the same.  The kind that enables one to build a stronger bonding with people and with the whole creation for better relations and better personal or group success, with the magnification of power resulting from the coming close together of individuals thus empowered. … Mine is not an opinion, it’s an experience, a life, a reality.”  Well said!

Personal Study and a Personal Wish

This entire work is intended and designed to be a person­al sharing of the enjoyment, dedicated to all who would resonate well in such enjoyment. In other words, I am not trying to con­vince anyone who does not believe in the phenomenon of holons and synergism. This is full of quotes not as any attempt to invoke so-called “authority figures” to instantly resolve debates and dilemmas, for such intellectual names can only bring a reader to take this work more seriously, and cannot win any argument for me. In any argumentation I get involved in I personally dislike the practice of “hiding behind a coat of quotes.”  

But there is really no argument being conducted here, there is only this happy sharing among people who enjoy at least a bit of intellectual articulation of what we can call a resonance. And I sort of “invited” the sources of my quotes here to join in the happy synergy.  Much of the contents of this book comes from various illustrious writers, my only claim to authorship here is the attempt to choreograph their ideas and relate them to the development and current content of my own views.

There is a special personal reason I have had for desiring to write a book to express my views about a lot of things.  This is the drive to be understood by people clearly and comprehensively for what I have actually been trying to say and trying to do in my earth life. I don’t want to be remembered in my epitaph simply as “someone who was tireless and fast in doing a thousand and one things,” while people will not remember having understood what all that passion and energy was all about.  

Before mid-1997, I would have deserved such fate, for I was then really still unfocused, unable to say “no” to causes seeking my involvement. But with the crucial help of a person who has become my dearest friend I was able to find, and even to start to actualize, a clear focus, the focus of synergy-building all around for human development and harmony.  This personal close-in adviser and associate did not suggest that I decrease my activities, but to find a real focus for them. And I feel this focused “overexertion” of efforts in the past six years really deserves to be fully understood clearly by anyone to claim to have known me, even if only in memory after I shall have returned to the Source. People are most welcome to refute or dismiss me anytime on anything, but I seek to be substantially understood first before any such refutations or dismissals are made.

Some acquaintances have simply shaken their heads in condescending amusement when they get to learn of this or that collective effort that they simplistically equate to, or even dismiss as, just my own personal passion and energy.  “What will he think of next?” they would ask rhetorically and with a smiling shake of head. There is this hidden fear, admittedly coming from my unslain ego, that during my wake the people there would be wondering aloud or in whispers or in quiet thoughts around my coffin what it was that I was spending my hyper­active life on in a perpetually-hectic mode and in what a close friend had once labeled as “unexplained poverty” (profuse apologies to my two sons for the practical consequences of this on their own lives!).  And then they would give up altogether in the wondering and settle for the thought that “well, he was a good man – with inexhaustible energies and passion for some noble personal aims or other, which now all die with him.”    

I don’t want to be emulated or even remembered only for my levels of energy, for my passions, because I sincerely feel that if at least some of the people I would leave behind would only comprehend clearly and fully at that point what I was trying to do and why, there would be a better chance that the torch I shall have carried to the end would be carried on with whatever momentum and to whatever degree of attainment I shall have been able by that time to help pursue these causes.  Thus, with this writing, people I am now working with would have access to my mind after my graduation to the “Great Beyond,” and they may choose to pay more attention by that time to what I’ve been trying to explain to them, not because these are universal truths but because these ideas might prove useful to them in their work by that time.  Of course, it would help if the clear and full comprehending is achieved while I am still around in this world.

Of course, I am conscious that because this book is thick (thicker than my usual writing output), as thick as my expla­nations may have really been “too long” for some of my co-workers to sustain their interest, considering their own hectic schedules, memories of me may still be limited to that “…die with him” possible epitaph. The writing of this book is just another attempt to avoid that kind of ending of my earth life if it can indeed be avoided.

For it is always better to try and fail than not to have tried at all. Then, there is this line of thought from the “Sower and the Seed” parable that says many copies of this book may indeed fall on fertile ground.  Are you willing and ready to be part of that?

Collecting, Synergizing, Experiences

Back in 1998, the SanibLakas Foundation management team started a fortnightly light-sharing newsletter mainly for the internal use of the Foundation membership. The introductory editorial of the maiden issue of Sanib-Sinag (issue No. 1, Feb. 15, 1998) speaks about collecting and synergizing experiences.  (The periodical was later stopped and later found reincarnation in live eyeball-to-eyeball sharing sessions also called Sanib-Sinag. There is now an e-mail list group version called “LightShare.”)  

That editorial read, in part (underscoring in the original):

“A ‘collector of experiences.’ This was how a Saniblakas Foundation officer described herself in a recent environment-oriented forum. Of course, everybody is a collector of personal experiences that accumulate as life memories and hopefully wisdom that one would later carry into old age, but this is not what she was talking about. As an active member of the growing ‘Saniblakas family,’ she is into collecting experiences and lessons from many people to be shared with and among bigger multitudes, for a synergy of experiences and lessons that would redound to the empowerment of all who are directly and indirectly involved in this process.

        “As the Saniblakas leadership tries to pursue the Found­ation’s mission ‘to help build a truly empowered nation of em­powered communities and individuals through individual human development and optimized synergies,’ it needs to learn fast all the lessons on individual human development and optimized synergies both for inspirational and practical purposes. Chances are, many of these ideas are already within the present Board of Trustees, each profound insight lodged in the minds of two or three of them or most of the Board members. We all have something profound and valuable to share.  But opportunities for their airing and sharing have been very limited.

       “The distinct experiences and the lessons in the minds of individual Board members, as well as of the other active members of the growing ‘Saniblakas family,’ as well as the Foundation’s friends and partners, are distinct bright rays of the Whole Truth, ‘ang bawat kaisipang makatotohanan ay sinag ng buong liwanag!’ We have to gather and forge all these bright rays of thought together in a synergy of the minds to produce an immense magnitude of knowledge and wisdom that the Saniblakas Foundation needs badly and needs immediately for the sake of pursuing our work successfully.”

Crucially Vital Assertion

A cursory look at the table of contents will reveal that the book Human Holons is written in four parts.  These parts are aspects of one reality.  Still, the whole exercise of expressing that one seamless reality as I reflect and interpret it in my own mind uses words.  While thoughts and ideas, and feelings are uncontainable, I have chosen to express them, from mind to mind, in the form of sentences and paragraphs that have had to be grouped in bigger clusters of points, each with its own distinct focus, and labeled in this book as Part One, Part Two, etc.  I hope that this necessity does not erect high walls of simplistic separation in the reader’s mind between such Parts.

Distinction should not be allowed to mean separation; without distinction and diversity all complementation, harmony and teamwork cannot be possible; separation is the intellect’s mistaken negation and denial of the actual fact of Oneness.  In synergism and the reality of holons, this is a crucially vital assertion.

Not for a Forced Readership

Some people will surely find this entire work “too long and wordy.” Well, “it’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away,” go the lyrics of the popular smiling song by the Beegees; and the Angelus Prayer celebrates the Word becoming flesh. Writers like me (or a team of writers like us) are seri­ously engaged in the human enterprise of putting concepts into words hopefully for clearer communication, for those who find such communication useful and even enjoyable.  

The usual problem met by this effort is when the readers are pressured to read, or at least feel pressured to read, what they don’t really want to read, either because they find the topic un­important or they feel they are already very, very, very familiar with it, or both, and the first thing they do is to immediately find the whole work “too long.” Instead of appreciating the amount of work done to produce the book or article of considerable length, they feel so much more the heavy burden of the sheer effort they are “pressured” to exert just trying to read it through.  But because there are some other people who are receptive enough even to long articles, or even novels, or books like this one, for as long as they can derive something out of it, and intellectual discourse does have at least some value among co-learners of a concept, writers can still do their work, preferably at times playfully so both writer and reader can enjoy the interlude. No pressure, just enjoyment in sharing.

And the opportunity you may choose to use to help you unlock the powerful potential of the cosmic principle of synergism right within your own self -- as a “human holon,” a sleepwalking nugget and magnet, that you have been and will be.  The realization of us being holons with power-packed synergies can help us all along the shift that Bob Dylan ap­parently intended this line to help achieve: “He who isn’t busy being born is busy dying.”

This goes along the same line that Ron Jenson challenges readers with his book, right from the very wording of its title: Make A Life, Not Just A Living  (Broadman and Holman Publishers, Nashville Tennessee, 1995).  Right in the introduc­tion chapter of his book, Jenson sets the goal of holistic success for human life to pursue:  “Think about it for a moment. You are a whole person. You have emotional, volitional, spiritual and relational sides to your being. Beyond that you have responsibilities in various realms—business, family, community. And each of these areas has its own subresponsiblities. They are all interrelated.”

This book was written to reach many people quite probably including those whose reception would be one of appreciation and conscious practical application of the synergism principle on their lives and a felt imperative to share the joyful message. Copies that get to them (to you?) may be like seeds that fall on fertile ground.

These copies might be instantly needing some protective wrapping, for many readers might eagerly await their turn to borrow and turn these pages, before seeking to have their own copies. Especially after I shall have graduated to the Great Beyond.  I can dream, can’t I?  The empowered lives of people who shall have made good use of its contents may well be what can give other readers and would-be readers enough reason to give this book a second look.    

Ed Aurelio C. Reyes Makati, Philippines February 14, 2003   click here to continue to PART ONE of the book